Charming Cheers for Despotism

So Rosanne Barr would send the very rich to re-education camps or to the guillotine to cut off their heads. Ha, ha, ha. Well, she's funny. But she didn't seem to be joking.



She is down there at the Wall Street protests among the radicals who, like her, have no patience with constitutional government and the rule of law. They have no patience with other people who are not as enlightened as their 20 year-old selves.



But if Barr were spouting the same kill-your-political-opponents and concentration camp rhetoric from a Nazi or Fascist stance instead of from the communist direction (a la Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot), the liberal media establishment would respond with something other than charmed amusement. There is nothing charming about this.

Do the Rich and Poor a Favor. Back Off

Last week, when a rumor leaked out that the Fed is plotting new measures to stimulate the economy, perhaps a QE3, gold prices spiked. QE refers to quantitative easing, the purchase of American government bonds by our own Federal Reserve Bank, effectively injecting money into the economy, or what we call "printing money."

The Street reported,

Gold prices popped Tuesday after Chicago Federal Reserve President Charles Evans said further measures to stimulate the economy could be necessary. The rally continued in after-hours trading after the Fed's latest minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee meeting in August showed a growing number of presidents calling for more stimulus.

Every time the Fed plays this card, the economy actually slows. Alan Reynolds gave us a detailed account of this in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, "The Fed vs. the Recovery." He concludes, "In the end, quantitative easing turned out to be an anti-stimulus which stimulated nothing but the cost of living and the cost of production. Good riddance."


Whenever President Obama dives into the economy to make things right, rather than stimulating, he depresses the economy. Instead of inspiring hope and confidence, he creates uncertainly and stagnation.


In light of the aggressively interventionist liberal government that we have suffer in these three years of the Obama presidency, Gary Becker compares market imperfections with the government imperfects that go with government attempts to perfect the market ("The Great Recession and Government Failure"). He finds that "market failure" is like nothing compared to the more predictable "government failure." He writes, "This recession might well have been a deep one even with good government policies, but "government failure" added greatly to its length and severity, including its continuation to the present."


The Journal's editorial today ("In Government We Mistrust"), reflect on this same problem of liberal, "progressive," government intervention and the predictable damage it does. They cites a Gallup poll that has tracked public confidence in government since the Eisenhower presidency. "Every time Democrats attempt to govern the country from the ideological left, they damage government's reputation and status." It's a demonstrable historical pattern. They supply the charts.


For another look at the unflattering comparison between Obama and the Gipper (he has invited it), read Stephen Moore's "Obamanomics vs. Reaganomics," also in the WSJ.


But it is not just the economic well-being of the population as whole that liberals damage. They hurt the people whom they say they are most concerned to help: the poor. I write about this in my Worldmag column from a month ago, "Save the Poor from their 'Friends'."

The poor in America (whoever exactly that is) have many friends in Washington D.C. But that is part of their problem. When your friends are powerful and aggressively well-intentioned but unwise, you don’t need enemies.

They tried to help unwed mothers. They gave them AFDC, and swelled their ranks, and made the condition permanent. The Evangelical left is passionately wed to this tradition of "help." I describe Jim Wallis's opposition to welfare reform in 1996 and now his "Circle of Protection" for the poor against any rollback of the welfare state.


It brings to mind Ronald Reagan’s quip, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

The Ills of Bureaucracy

Ideal Citizens for Most UN Member Nations - Dag Hammerskjold Plaza, NYC

On Sunday afternoon, I was sitting in Dag Hammerskjold Plaza, across from the UN complex, reading The Way of a Pilgrim (an Eastern Orthodox classic on prayer and communion with God) waiting for the NOM rally for marriage to begin. That sets the scene. A young woman with a mischievous 2-year-old sat down beside me on the bench and asked me what I was reading. The conversation went from there.

I discovered that she was Rwandan who left Rwanda around the time of the genocide and worked for the UN in Croatia during the time of the conflict in that region. She came to America in 1997. But she no longer works for the United Nation. She is an abstract artist with a distaste for the UN that she was happy to share with me. "I couldn't stand the bureaucracy," she told me. I was then surprised that she looked at me intently and asked me, "What is the problem with bureaucracy?" She had her own ideas, but wanted to know what I thought. I paused to think, and then it all came flooding to mind. Bureaucracy has the sour connotation that it does because it is four things: impersonal, unresponsive, self-serving, and (largely because of these three features) inefficient.

This is the topic for my column this week at Worldmag.com: "The Bureaucracy Gospel." Everything a liberal wants to do to solve the world's problems, including all of your problems, involves a federal government program, which in turn requires a bureaucracy.

These four ills have a lot to do with public opposition to Big Government. (I capitalize those words because Big Government is genetically related to Big Brother.) Nationwide, federal solutions to social and economic problems (Big Government) always create and perpetuate bureaucracy and its ills. Think of the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Social Security Administration. These agencies have combined budgets of approximately $238 billion and employ 132,000 people. HHS administers over $700 billion, a quarter of all federal outlays, including Medicare and Medicaid payments. It is estimated that Social Security will pay out $734 billion in benefits this year.

Consider how Social Security, to say nothing of Medicare, is going to bankrupt us in the next thirty years as the baby boom generation passes through the retirement entitlement system. In 1945, about a decade after the Social Security Administration was established, the ratio of workers paying into the system to the aged drawing out of it was 42-to-1.* That is, for every one retiree making use of the system there were 42 working people. No problem.  Now that ratio is about 3-to-1. Do you see the problem? People are living much longer than they did in 1940. The boomers will reduce that to 2:1.

The debt crisis is the crisis of the welfare state. As Europe is discovering, you just cannot keep borrowing to fund ever more generous government giveaways for everything that you feel everyone should have.

"As Europe buckles under the weight of debt-financed social programs, America still has time to address its social dependence on government entities that are by their very nature impersonal, unresponsive, self-serving, and inefficient. But time is quickly running out."

(I threw in those haunting statues of seemingly tyrannized, soulless human figures scattered around Dag Hammerskjold Plaza in New York because they are the sort of people that bureaucracy creates and likes to serve.)

********************

* I got this figure from the SSA website. The figures seem to hide a story, however. It lists the 1940 ratio as (roughly) 159:1. That is eligible workers to beneficiaries. Five years later it is only 41:1. Five years later in 1950, it is 16:1. Five years later it is half that. Then it's 5:1. In 1975, it is just above 3:1. It moved down to 2.9-to-1 in 2010. So it has been in the very expensive range for 45 years now.

Look here for figures on the complicated life expectancy factor.

The link for the 42:1 figure I give in the body of this post comes from the Prudential. If you can trust a life insurance company to give you straight numbers, who can you trust?

The Entitlements Around Our Necks

The interesting historical confluence of muscular Obama progressivism, the continuing fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, and the European welfare state insolvency has led to serious questions about the feasibility of the American welfare state.

So in my column this week, I examine the relative merits of private charity and government entitlement, or what Tocqueville calls "legal charity."

Some comments on last week's column, "Obama's Godly Government," actually condemned private charity as an evil, and extolled entitlements as superior in both efficiency and humanity.

Said one, "Its the stability of funding from entitlements that allows a recipient to plan ahead, set goals and work his/her way back to independence. Charity is inconsistent, random and in a subtle manner demands an obligation."

Said another, "Charity ennobles the giver and obligates the recipient. The former is noble while the latter is common. This is the core dynamic of feudalism. Entitlements make possible the orderly transfer of substance to the next generation, whether through inheritance, social contract, or special grant. ... The welfare state has been an essential ingredient in moral and material betterment since the passing of the ancien régime."

Here I let Tocqueville take the ball:

.

In my column last week, I asserted, "Charity ennobles and enables. Entitlements enslave and incapacitate." I was echoing Alexis de Tocqueville who, in his “Memoir on Pauperism” (a must-read), argues that legal charity, what we call public welfare or entitlements, “depraves men even more than it impoverishes them.” Private charity involves people in one another’s lives who ordinarily would occupy separate worlds, the giver actively affirming the receiver’s humanity, and the receiver inspired with hope and gratitude. By contrast, attempts by the government to duplicate this relationship inspire resentment in the rich and envy in the poor, while leaving them still rich and poor

Here I take up the ball myself.

Entitlements are attractive because of their apparent stability as a system of relief in contrast to the comparative unpredictability of private giving. But that is also their danger. As they are institutionalized and made permanent, they incline people to rely on them just as permanently. The widespread cultural habit of people voluntarily helping people in need—carrying them through a period of unemployment, taking care of them in their old age, providing pro bono medical care—unites us with ties of obligation and mutual affection. But the omniprovisional state destroys even natural human ties. Families evaporate. Communities disintegrate. It infantilizes, and even dehumanizes. The brick wall of economic unsustainability that we are beginning to experience is merely adding material constraints on the entitlement way of helping each other to the tragic moral constraints that have been obvious for some time.

Michael Goodwin points to the entitlement attitude behind the public sector union revolt in Wisconsin and other states in this Fox News article which is adapted from something in The New York Post.

The Wisconsin showdown between a determined Republican governor and spoiled public unions is shaping up as a crucial test of state and municipal solvency. But the financial stakes represent only part of the much larger conflict engulfing America. The real war is over the entitlement culture itself. And while government spending is the most visible part, the ultimate issues are the character and fate of our nation.

The most powerful moral refutation of the entitlement regime I have read recently is Charles Murray's AEI address in 2009, "The Europe Syndrome." That should be in your must-read pile.

Youngters, The GOP, and the Political Future

Speaking of aging boomers, liberals, and dance show hosts, and the march of time,  Michael Barone brings to our attention today the droopy, silver haired antiquity of the House Democratic leadership in the new Congress. ("Wily Old Dems take on Whippersnapper Republicans," January 6, 2011) The GOP landslide in the 2010 midterm election brought a lot of young Republicans into the House, swept some young Democrats out, and left the liberal Old Bulls in the same seats they have occupied for thirty and forty years or more.

Democrats like to think of themselves as the young party, the party of new ideas. And in 2010, they remained the choice of the youngest voters, though by only half the margin in 2008.

But when you look at the top Democrats in the House, you don't see young faces. The ages of the ranking Democrats on the Appropriations, Ways and Means, Education, Energy and Commerce, Financial Services, Foreign Affairs and Judiciary committees are 70, 79, 65, 71, 70, 69 and 81. The three party leaders are 70, 71 and 70.

Think of the implications of the "Big Unit America" view of the country that these Old Bull liberals hold and that Barone describes, and of the "personal preferences" and "privacy settings" view of the world that the rising generation has (to say nothing of fast and efficient delivery). Where is the political future and which party is philosophically better positioned to seize it?

Dems Just Not That Into Economics

This is an expanded version of my column at WORLDmag.com (chart and video transcript).

********************

Daniel Klein's article, "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" (Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2010), is one you want to clip and save for handy reference. He documents how characteristically more ignorant liberals are of basic economics than conservatives are. Politicians in general are poorly versed in the dismal science, but the further left you are on the political spectrum, the more clueless you are likely to be on the subject. This is alarming because, while politics is not reducible to economics, most of what government does involves economics, directly or indirectly, and the further left the politician, the more likely he is to occupy himself with economic matters...sadly.

Here is an example of a question Klein posed to a range of respondents:

Consider one of the economic propositions in the December 2008 poll: "Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable." People were asked if they: 1) strongly agree; 2) somewhat agree; 3) somewhat disagree; 4) strongly disagree; 5) are not sure. Basic economics acknowledges that whatever redeeming features a restriction may have, it increases the cost of production and exchange, making goods and services less affordable. There may be exceptions to the general case, but they would be atypical.

Therefore, we counted as incorrect responses of "somewhat disagree" and "strongly disagree." This treatment gives leeway for those who think the question is ambiguous or half right and half wrong. They would likely answer "not sure," which we do not count as incorrect.


In this case, percentage of conservatives answering incorrectly was 22.3%, very conservatives 17.6% and libertarians 15.7%. But the percentage of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly was 67.6% and liberals 60.1%. The pattern was not an anomaly.

Liberals generally answer with what they want to be true, what they believe ought to be true, or perhaps with what they can force to be true with properly executed legislation, not with what actually happens in the world when it is left to itself. Klein observes that, "the left has trouble squaring economic thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics." May I venture to say that they don't think; they feel?

Klein ends with this: "Governmental power joined with wrongheadedness is something terrible, but all too common. Realizing that many of our leaders and their constituents are economically unenlightened sheds light on the troubles that surround us."

David Ranson provides us with an all too real example of this economic ignorance and wishful thinking in "The Revenue Limits of Tax and Spend" (WSJ, May 17, 2010).

The feds assume a relationship between the economy and tax revenue that is divorced from reality. Six decades of history have established one far-reaching fact that needs to be built into fiscal calculations: Increases in federal tax rates, particularly if targeted at the higher brackets, produce no additional revenue. For politicians this is truly an inconvenient truth.

This little nugget of the way things work even has a scientific sounding name: "Hauser's Law." On the basis of 60 years of consistent data, W. Kurt Hauser of the Hoover Institution found that there is an impenetrable ceiling on what wealth squeezing government can ring out of the economy in the form of tax revenues. No matter how we try, federal tax receipts will not exceed about 19% of GDP under the best of circumstances. Under present conditions, which are far from the best, any attempt to raise taxes will reduce GDP and thus actually reduce revenues. This article is another one for my "keeper" file.

But liberals don't care. They're not actually interested in paying for anything as long as deficit spending allows them to charge it to generations who will not be voting until after they are out of office. They are also just not that interested in economics at all. What matters to them is "fairness," even if it means bankrupting the country to pay for it.

Consider this golden moment during the final stages of the 2008 Democratic primaries. Barack Obama, saying what he knows the American people believe and want to hear him say, but what is completely alien to his way of operating, says he believes in paying as you go. But in response to Charles Gibson's question, he shows his complete indifference to economic constraints when it comes to the egalitarian moral imperative of "fairness."

GIBSON: All right. You have, however, said you would favor an increase in the capital gains tax. As a matter of fact, you said on CNBC, and I quote, "I certainly would not go above what existed under Bill Clinton," which was 28 percent. It's now 15 percent. That's almost a doubling, if you went to 28 percent.

But actually, Bill Clinton, in 1997, signed legislation that dropped the capital gains tax to 20 percent.

OBAMA: Right.

GIBSON: And George Bush has taken it down to 15 percent.

OBAMA: Right.

GIBSON: And in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased; the government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down.

So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?

OBAMA: Well, Charlie, what I've said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.

We saw an article today which showed that the top 50 hedge fund managers made $29 billion last year -- $29 billion for 50 individuals. And part of what has happened is that those who are able to work the stock market and amass huge fortunes on capital gains are paying a lower tax rate than their secretaries. That's not fair.

And what I want is not oppressive taxation. I want businesses to thrive, and I want people to be rewarded for their success. But what I also want to make sure is that our tax system is fair and that we are able to finance health care for Americans who currently don't have it and that we're able to invest in our infrastructure and invest in our schools.

And you can't do that for free.

OBAMA: And you can't take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children and our grandchildren, and then say that you're cutting taxes, which is essentially what John McCain has been talking about.

And that is irresponsible. I believe in the principle that you pay as you go. And, you know, you don't propose tax cuts, unless you are closing other tax breaks for individuals. And you don't increase spending, unless you're eliminating some spending or you're finding some new revenue. That's how we got an additional $4 trillion worth of debt under George Bush. That is helping to undermine our economy. And it's going to change when I'm president of the United States.

GIBSON: But history shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up.

OBAMA: Well, that might happen, or it might not. It depends on what's happening on Wall Street and how business is going. I think the biggest problem that we've got on Wall Street right now is the fact that we got have a housing crisis that this president has not been attentive to and that it took John McCain three tries before he got it right.

And if we can stabilize that market, and we can get credit flowing again, then I think we'll see stocks do well. And once again, I think we can generate the revenue that we need to run this government and hopefully to pay down some of this debt.

Senator Obama weaves back and forth between advocating fairness at the expense of revenue considerations, and sounding fiscally responsible for the right-of-center American voter. But the two come crashing together in an embarrassing display of either contradiction or hypocrisy--Gibson caught it--when he says, "But what I also want to make sure is that our tax system is fair and that we are able to finance health care for Americans who currently don't have it and that we're able to invest in our infrastructure and invest in our schools. And you can't do that for free." In other words, we want a tax system that seems fair to a progressive liberal, and yet one that can pay for the generous social programs which that same sense of fairness requires.

The Senator likely just didn't see the contradiction because he is what Klein calls progressive/very liberal, and so he thinks primarily in sentimentally moral terms,* not economic ones, and simply expects economic reality to support those judgments. That is also how Obama the President has been behaving. Wall Street ought to be punished, even though a crippled and fettered Wall Street cannot fuel a recovery. BP ought to be prosecuted and pillaged as soon as possible, even though a bankrupt BP can neither clean up the spill nor compensate anyone for damages.

That, at least, is the generous interpretation.

*One can also think rationally about morality, of course, but liberals will have nothing to do with it because it leads to moral absolutism, which they absolutely abhor.

We are Engaged in a Great Civil War

The depth of our political divide in America constitutes a civil war, the one side preserving the regime and the other side working to overthrow it. But thankfully it's a cold war, not a shooting war. All that we need for preserving the republic against it's progressivist overthrowers is to re-school the American public in their heritage of liberty.

I have been writing recently about the movement of American government in dangerous directions toward a subtle, seductive, but very real form of despotism. Most recently I published "The Temptation to Dictatorship" at WORLDmag.com, a further reflection on what I wrote here in "The Dictatorship of Hope and Change." We hear Tom Friedman and Andrea Mitchell musing openly on Meet The Press about the public benefits that would result from allowing Barack Obama and his soul-mates in Congress to suspend the Constitution for a day and really put things right. This was not a careless thought. Friedman was just following up on what he stated in one his recent books. But only Paul Gigot expressed shock and incredulity. When he did, the political cognoscenti around him just blinked and went on.

This dangerous indifference to the institutions of liberty is not limited to a few reckless talking heads on a Sunday news show. It pervades the liberal establishment. And if it were only indifference, we would be in better shape than we are. George Will has drawn national attention to the principled hostility toward our very form of government that has characterized the Democratic Party for almost a hundred years, and which Barack Obama has raised to the level of mortal struggle.

Today, as it has been for a century, American politics is an argument between two Princetonians -- James Madison, Class of 1771, and Woodrow Wilson, Class of 1879. Madison was the most profound thinker among the Founders. Wilson, avatar of "progressivism," was the first president critical of the nation's founding. Barack Obama's Wilsonian agenda reflects its namesake's rejection of limited government.

In my WORLDmag.com column today, "Our Present Civil Cold War," I continue Will's train of thought to what I think is its implied but unstated conclusion. (Michael Lind at Salon.com responds to Will's thesis here.)

*****************

What Wilson began, the Great Depression interrupted, but Franklin Roosevelt took it up again with great energy in the New Deal. Lyndon Johnson carried it forward with the Great Society, and now Barack Obama has raised this war against limited, constitutional government to the level of mortal struggle.


Now we are engaged in a great civil cold war. It is a political war between the advocates of limited and unlimited government, between those who support the Founding and the Constitution as amended and the self-described progressives who, by definition, reject what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us in favor of what Chief Justice Earl Warren called “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

Will takes his prompt from a new book by William Voegeli, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State. In the progressive view of politics, there is no limiting principle for government. Writes Voegeli, “Lacking a limiting principle, progressivism cannot say how big the welfare state should be but must always say that it should be bigger than it currently is.” We can see this in President Roosevelt’s 1944 “Economic Bill of Rights” speech, in which he declared the commitment of his government to, among other things,

...the right of every family to a decent home; the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; the right to a good education.

Thus rights become government entitlements that don’t limit government, but instead empower and expand it.

For progressives, the purpose of government is not to protect certain natural rights that in turn limit the government itself. This is the political theory of the Founding and the Constitution. Rather, government’s job is to discover new rights that come to light as we morally evolve, i.e., as we progress.

Our choice is between two very different forms of government. Limited government stands opposite progressive government of unlimited reach. Individual liberty stands opposite federally guaranteed personal security. Our system of checks and balances stands opposite the popularly unaccountable and trans-political bureaucracy. In the Great Civil War, we fought—as Lincoln put it—for “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This new struggle is a domestic cold war for that same understanding of freedom. We need to be clear that there is a fundamental difference between these politically divergent ways of life, and that the choice is now clearly before us. Otherwise we will simply slip peacefully into what Alexis de Tocqueville called “soft despotism,” the way a freezing man welcomes the embrace of death like a comforting lover.

*****************

Reading List:

Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, The Federalist Papers.

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America.

Walter McDougall, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History (HarperCollins, 2004).

R.J. Pestritto. Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression (HarperCollins, 2007).

Matthew Spalding, We Still Hold These Truths: Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future (ISI, 2009).

William Voegeli, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State (Encounter, 2010).

James Caeser, Nature and History in American Political Development (Harvard UP, 2008).

Also, anything by Martin Diamond, Charles Kesler, Forrest McDonald, or Herbert Storing.

You should also explore through these websites and catalogues the considerable labors that thoughtful patriots have undertaken over that past two generations or so in the re-schooling of America in its education for liberty.

Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs
The Constitution Society
The Federalist Society
The Founders' Constitution
The Heritage Foundation
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute
The Jack Miller Center
Lehrman American Studies Center
Liberty Fund

The Dictatorship of Hope and Change

Roger Simon at Pajamas Media calls it nostalgie du fascisme ("The Culture Wars are Turning," May 24, 2010). Woody Allen tells a Spanish magazine that Barack Obama needs to be given dictatorial power for just a "few years" to get us out of what he sees as our various messes.


Sentiments such as Woody has expressed indicate a liberal impatience with messiness of free government, which is in part the necessity of persuading your neighbors in sufficient numbers to bring your views into law. It also indicates a liberal arrogance that precludes democratic compromise.

I would be tempted to dismiss these as the ridiculous babbling of a Hollywood comedian, except that liberal columnist Thomas Friedman, the winner of three Pulitzer Prizes (1983, 1988, 2002), recently said the same thing on Meet the Press, and veteran journalist Andrea Mitchell agreed with him.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

MR. GREGORY: I want to follow up on one point, though, Tom Friedman, which is when you have such activism on the left and the right, what does that do to the political center and how do you govern in that respect? Bob Bennett, the senator who was defeated in a nominated convention in Utah, wrote this in The Washington Post this morning, "The tea party movement's ... two strongest slogans," he writes, "are `Send a message to Washington,' `Take back America.' I know both very well because they were the main tools used to defeat me ... two weeks ago. ... Yet when the new members of Congress whom these slogans elect in November take office ... will they stand firmly on partisan sidelines continuing to shout slogans? Or will they reach across the aisle in the interest of the country? ... If they want their movement to be more than a wave that crashes on the beach and then recedes back into the ocean, leaving nothing behind but empty sand, they should stop the `gloom talk.' These are not the worst of times we have ever faced, nor is the Constitution under serious threat." Where is the center that actually does something, that actually achieves things in Washington if this is what we're creating?

MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, David, it's been decimated. It's been decimated by everything from the gerrymandering of political districts to cable television to an Internet where I can create a digital lynch mob against you from the left or right if I don't like where you're going, to the fact that money and politics is so out of control--really our Congress is a forum for legalized bribery. You know, that's really what, what it's come down to. So I don't--I, I--I'm worried about this, it's why I have fantasized--don't get me wrong--but that what if we could just be China for a day? I mean, just, just, just one day. You know, I mean, where we could actually, you know, authorize the right solutions, and I do think there is a sense of that, on, on everything from the economy to environment. I don't want to be China for a second, OK, I want my democracy to work with the same authority, focus and stick-to-itiveness. But right now we have a system that can only produce suboptimal solutions.

MS. MITCHELL: And, in fact, Tom, you're absolutely right. One case in point, the Financial Regulation Bill, which we can get to...

MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

MS. MITCHELL: ...but Chris Dodd realized that Bob Bennett, with whom he wanted to work, the ranking member on the Banking Committee, was so swept away by his fight back home in Utah that he could not work across party lines, and that there is so much punishment for anyone who works across party lines to try to come up the best solutions so they end up with things that are not optimal.

MR. GIGOT: We'd all be in jail if we were China for a second.

MR. FRIEDMAN: No, I--it's--I understand. I don't want to be China, I want our system to work, though.

We all know what's right, apparently. It's just our hopelessly broken democratic process that's getting in the way. They speak as though we're the Weimar Republic. And what do you think of someone who laments the disappearance of the political center while at the same time longing for dictatorial powers? Notice that it took the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot to step in with the obvious: The cameras are rolling, and you're talking like crazy people.

Friedman, the prophet of the broadsheet, expressed the same fascinating political proposal to Tom Brokaw in 2008, again on Meet The Press.

MR. BROKAW: You have an intriguing proposition in this book. You'd like to be China for a day, just one day.

MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, it comes from actually a dialogue I had with Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, and Jeff was making the point that, you know, really almost out of exasperation of a company that's been trying to be an energy innovative leader, saying, "Look, Tom, we need is"--what Jeff said is we need a president who's going to set the right price for carbon. Set the right standard, set the right regulation. Shape the market so it will be innovative. Everyone will kind of whine and moan for a month and then the whole ecosystem will take off. And I thought about that afterwards and I said to him, "You know, Jeff, what you're really saying is, `If only we could be China for a day. Just one day.'" So I wrote a chapter called "China for a day, but not for two." Really, about what we would do if for one day we could impose, cut through all the lobbyists, all the amendments, all the earmarks, and actually impose the right conditions to get our market to take off.

As he indicates in the interview, he was summarizing the point he makes at the beginning of chapter 16 of his book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, "China for a Day (But Not for Two)."

As far as I am concerned, China's system of government is inferior to ours in every respect--except one. That is the ability of China's current generation of leaders--if they want to--to cut through all their legacy industries, all the pleading special interests, all the bureaucratic obstacles, all the worries of a voter backlash, and simply order top-down the sweeping change in prices, regulations, standards, education, and infrastructure that reflect China's strategic long-term national interests, changes that would normally take Western democracies years or decades to debate and implement (pp. 372-373).

In other words, China's system of government is inferior to ours in every way except for the totalitarian power the rulers have at their disposal. It's like saying you deplore apartheid except for the way it treats the races.

But the source of their annoyance is not really those nasty Republicans. At bottom, it is the dumb sheep they represent--chief among whom are country people and Evangelical Christians. Elizabeth Scalia reports more fully on this at First Things, including this nice observation:

The leftist party that these people support is currently in control of both houses of congress and the White House (and they are well-represented within the federal judiciary) and yet, it is not enough. The power is not pure enough, it is not invincible enough; their power is diluted because, dammit, those little people crowing about the constitution all over the internets are mucking things up!

Republican government, that is, self-government by a free people, unlike mere democracy, requires a people who has the collective capacity for self-government. They need a minimal level of education generally, an understanding of their system of government and of the value of their liberties, and a moral restraint that in most cases comes by devotion to a religion that is compatible with republican government. People who long for these sorts of emergency powers--or perhaps only the power to "deem" major health care reform bills into law--think of most Americans as comparable to the poor, tribal, historically tyrannized, and culturally slavish people in "developing" countries who are not quite ready for democratically accountable government. This is one reason there is a Tea Party movement storming its way across the American political landscape, heading for November and beyond.


Click on the blog's "fascism" label for posts during the 2008 election season observing fascist tendencies on the left in general and among Obama supporters in particular.

Also, have a look at Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.

The Perfectly Rational Party and You

Peter Wehner's WSJ article, "No, America Isn't Ungovernable" (Feb. 12, 2010) helps explain why the ruling Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue are behaving the way they are, and draws attention to the premise that underlies liberal-progressive arrogance in general.

The Democrats occupy the White House and have a majority in both houses of Congress. So why have they not been able to do everything they've wanted to do for the last 35 years, but haven't been able to? Three reasons. The people, the other party, and the system itself.

The people are stupid. They must be. If we have the perfect President and if he has proposed the most perfectly rational legislative agenda, then if the people do not support it in sufficient numbers they must be "a nation of dodos" (Time's Joe Klein) as well as childish, ignorant, and incoherent (Slate's Jacon Weisberg).

The Republicans are just nihilists. When you have the perfect President and you are presented with the most perfectly rational legislative agenda, there can be no disagreement except out of simple will to power, "pure nihilism for naked political gain" (Newsweek's Michael Cohen). So that must be what is behind Republican opposition to Democratic health care reform, cap-and-trade carbon emmisions control, card check union organizing rules, etc.

The Senate rules are outdated. If the Senate, where the Democrats barely had a supermajority until the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts broke it, cannot pass a perfectly rational piece of legislation like the House version of health care reform for a perfect President, it must be "ominously dysfunctional" (Paul Krugman) and wholly incompatible with what is necessary for governing modern nation.

It is all premised on the liberal self-understanding (which it never crosses their minds to question): "We liberals are rational and philanthropic; anyone who disagrees with us must therefore be stupid and malicious."

For further insight into the liberal/progressive worldview and the mind of our President, you should also read George Will's recent column, "Progressives and the Growing Dependency Agenda."

The Weight of Other People in Politics

 

Scott Rasmussen will be speaking at The King's College here in New York City on March 3. As surely you know, he is a prominent American political pollster.

He is also the author of a newly released book, In Search of Self-Governance.

“Self-governance is about far more than politics and government,” says Rasmussen. “It requires a lot of the American people, and it has nothing to do with the petty partisan games played by Republicans and Democrats. Unfortunately, even after more than 200 years of success, there is an urgent need to defend this most basic of American values.” 

This is a principle to which President Obama sometimes pays lip service, indicating that he understands that many Americans believe in this understanding of liberty. He just doesn't share that belief. Neither does most of his party. In their view, good government is government that relieves you of the burden of self-governance. In fact, they appear to believe that "self-governance" and "liberty" are just arrangements by which the rich and powerful exploit the poor and helpless. That's why we need big government.

In his recent analysis of the President's State of the Union address, George Will ("Faux Contrition: Obama Blames the Public") points out how the president looked down on the poor gammas and deltas who make up most of the American people (whom he regards also with an aspect of pity on account of our heart rending stories).

Acknowledging that the longer the public has looked at the legislation the less the public has liked it, he blamed himself for not "explaining it more clearly." But his faux contrition actually blames the public: The problem is not the legislation's substance but the presentation of it to slow learners. He urged them to take "another look at the plan we've proposed."

In his infinite mercy, the president will draw on his truly unprecedented logical and rhetorical abilities and make another attempt to explain the self-evident virtues of his health care reform plan (which he called a plan, even though there are two very different plans, as Will points out).

Not only is President Obama frustrated by our increasingly irksome insistence on retaining a role for ourselves in the government of our personal affairs (everything from choice of doctors to choice of light bulbs), he is also annoyed by having to share power not only with another political party, but also with two other branches of government. Will sees this attitude encapsulated in a phrase Obama used last night: the "weight of our politics."

Obama seems to regret the existence in Washington of...everyone else. He seems to feel entitled to have his way without tiresome interventions in the political process by the many interests affected by his agenda for radical expansion of the regulatory state.

Yet despite this annoyance with how the gears of Washington slow the advance of progress and defer our hopes, Washington (not even state government) is always the answer.

Obama's leitmotif is: Washington is disappointing, Washington is annoying, Washington is dysfunctional, Washington is corrupt, verily Washington is toxic -- yet Washington should conscript a substantially larger share of GDP, and Washington should exercise vast new controls over health care, energy, K-12 education, etc. 

What is false is ultimately incoherent. The truth is always consistent with itself.

Addendum:

Peter Wehner's analysis is along the same lines as Will's, but much more thorough in exposing what he calls "A Self-Referential State of the Union Address."

It was one of the worst State of the Union addresses in modern times – a stunning thing for a man who won the presidency in large measure based on the power and uplift of his rhetoric. ... The speech was defensive and petulant, backward-looking and condescending, petty and graceless. He didn't persuade people; he lectured them. What was on display last night was a man of unsurpassed self-righteousness engaged in constant self-justification. His first year in office has been, by almost every measure, a failure – and it is perceived as a failure by much of the public. Mr. Obama cannot stand this fact; it is clearly eating away at him.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into her expressions, but Michelle seemed to reflect the same attitude up in the balcony. This is the woman who was proud of her country for the first time in her life only when it was fawning over her husband in large numbers. Now that it's turning against his policies (though not necessarily against him personally), she's bitter again.

He also echoed the irony that Will highlighted: "And even as he castigated Washington for being "unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems," he continued to champion an agenda that would concentrate unprecedented power there."

Big Government and Self-Government

Patrick Henry in the Virginia House of Burgesses, 1851, 

speaking against the Stamp Act

One of my students in her final exam essay wrote, "Why should I trust my government if my government doesn't trust me?" She wrote these words in the context of reflecting on the political problem, viz., "How do you enable to government to restrain the governed while at the same time obliging it to restrain itself?"

Her question is at the heart of the liberal-conservative debate in America today, and the line of that very practical philosophical dispute is showing up in some surprising places of late. On January 19, 2010, the citizens of Massachusetts have the opportunity not only to fill the Senate seat recently vacated by Ted Kennedy, but also to pass a judgment on the political vision our present government is aggressively pursuing, often in opposition to the clear consensus of the American people. People's attention is focused on the current plans for health care reform, for combating what is supposed to be global warming, and for reviving the economy. Behind these plans, however, are fundamental questions concerning big government and self-government.


Liberals see people as fundamentally needy on the one hand and unworthy of being trusted to provide for one another and themselves on the other. Thus, privatizing Social Security would be a disaster. People would lose all their money in the stock market. Only the government can be trusted to steward people's retirement funds wisely. (Of course, they don't steward these funds at all. They spend them, and trust that they can pay us out of the contributions from our children and grandchildren, a formula for bankruptcy when the baby boomers move fully into retirement.)

And people certainly cannot be trusted to provide for their aged parents, so all the elderly must become wards of the state. This, of course, schools people in the view that their parents are, in the end, none of their concern. Liberals take the same view of children. Get them as early as possible into the public school system. If you want to homeschool your children, (a) you must be crazy and thus incompetent, and (b) the education you provide must be strictly regulated by the local public school authorities, regardless of how bad a job they themselves are doing educating children.

By contrast, conservatives trust people to manage their own affairs according to their own lights and preferences. This may not be wise for every people in the world, but it is certainly fitting for a free people such as we.

Aristotle says that a citizen in the proper sense of the word rules and is ruled in turn, as opposed to one who is a slave by nature who, by definition, requires direction from another. A true citizen, therefore, is not simply someone who enjoys a particular legal status, but is someone who by his character is capable of self-government. This is someone who has the intelligence, moral character, and practical judgment to make life decisions of sufficient wisdom for living a life of human flourishing along with others of similar character.

In short, a free citizen must be virtuous. For this reason, Aristotle identifies aristocracy (rule by the  virtuous few, i.e. the genuinely virtuous) as the best regime. The citizens under that regime rule and are ruled in turn with a view to the common good, or at least the common interest, not seeking their selfish advantage. In other words, the more self-government there is, the more good government there will be. The more virtue there is among a people, the more they will be governed by what Thomas Jefferson called the natural aristoi.

Thomas Jefferson also said, "That government governs best which governs least." He wrote those words in the context of a fairly virtuous people. He might well have added, "...having the least need to govern." The more virtue in a people, the less need for government over a people. The more virtuous a people is, the less they are in need of the restraining power of government. They are largely governed from within. As another of my students put it in her senior thesis, "Since justice by definition entails a just observance of law, law enforcers are less needed for a just people." The internal policemen of their character renders the need for outside policing to that extent unnecessary.

Thus, conservatives are concerned for public morality because they are concerned about people's capacity for liberty, i.e. self-government, both individually and corporately. Liberals, on the other hand, understand liberty as self-indulgence and post-modern autonomy, the freedom to construct one's own moral universe and live accordingly, provided that one does not "harm" anyone else (that provision being a completely groundless restriction within a post-modern frame of reference).

Conservatives are concerned to support personal virtue among the people (yes, it requires support, largely from religion, especially Christianity), so that they can live with the dignity of free people in a free republic. Liberals are happy to see people indulging themselves in any way they please while the government manages and provides for them in as many spheres of life as possible. Thus, American conservatism tends toward republican liberty, while progressive liberalism tends toward, well, benevolent totalitarianism, which in the end, because human nature is what it is, becomes simply totalitarianism.

Thus, the government of a free people can trust the people to govern their own affairs while it attends largely to what in principle they cannot do on their own. This is not to be confused with libertarianism, because it recognizes the need for virtue in the citizenry, and also that public virtue requires appropriate (not oppressive) public support and protection. The Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy that Christians should pray for their governments so that those governments would fulfill their divine calling as government--no less and no more--"that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way" (I Tim. 2:2). What Paul means by a peaceful and quiet life is the liberty to govern one's own affairs, and to take a hand in the affairs of one's community, including taking care of the poor. This requires godliness, and is a life of human dignity. Good government provides for this liberty.

When government does not trust the people it governs, the people they distrust are either a slavish people or a free people. If they are slavish, the government indeed should not trust them, but should nonetheless take steps to cultivate better character in them so that they can live more as free people. This is statesmanship. Government that simply continues in that distrust and uses it as an opportunity to grow itself is just a form of mastery, and, as such, is not a government at all.

If the people it distrusts is a free people, then, as my student said, that people has no reason at all to trust their government. That government views them as slavish and will attempt by a thousand measures to reduce them to servile dependence. The Declaration of Independence describes this as "a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism."

Some people are called to die for liberty. Some are called only to vote.

Airport Security in Cloud Cuckoo Land

Here is an excerpt from my opinion essay on Worldmag.com, "Airport Security in the Clouds."

On Christmas Day there was a potential airline terrorist incident here in the United States. My in-laws, a retired couple living in Wyoming, were flying from Billings, Mont., to New York. After stripping them of their coats, belts, and shoes, an alert Federal TSA security officer spotted a 6-ounce tub of yogurt with live active enzymes. Loath to throw out a perfectly good container of Greek God, fig-flavored, acidophilus-infused yogurt with a fig at the bottom, my mother-in-law dug the plastic spoon out of her backpack (I’m surprised they were going to let her on the plane with a potentially deadly plastic spoon) and defiantly indulged herself before getting back in line.

We can all feel safer knowing that every reasonable precaution is being taken to ensure our flight safety in a terror-free America.

In a separate, unrelated incident, a 23-year old Nigerian man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a plane as it approached Detroit from Amsterdam using a pouch of chemicals sewn inside his underwear. Thankfully, despite his engineering degree from University College London, he only set himself aflame.

TSA immediately announced security measures even more personally invasive and humiliating than we currently suffer. “Every passenger flying into an American airport will now be subjected to an extra ‘pat-down’ body search and will have their hand luggage examined at terminal gates by airline staff just before they board,” The Sunday Times of London reported.

But brace yourself, travelers. That’s just the initial, reflexive response. Since Richard Reid attempted to blow up a plane over the Atlantic Ocean by lighting an explosive in his shoe, we’ve had to remove our shoes and belts before boarding a plane or entering a federal building. In the future, you should expect to have to remove your pants, too. So please be mindful of this, and make everyone’s progress through security as quick and efficient as possible by remembering to wear flight-appropriate clothing: a T-shirt and sweatpants, or perhaps even a surgical gown, if you’re comfortable with that.

And there's more! I go on to include more serious reflections of why airport security is so absurd, and I end with a darkly humorous conclusion that gives you the rest of the story on my mother-in-law and her exceptional yogurt. But you have to go to Worldmag.com, because they have advertisers who want a crack at your attention, and it is not my place to save you from that.

Godly Political Opposition

In the "Incompetence or Sabotage?" post below, reader Tim registers this protest:

This blogger continuously speaks evil of the President of the United States, which is his right of course, but to do so in the name of Christ or of Christianity is so misleading as to the nature of Jesus as to be evil in itself.

On this blog, we advocate, among other things, political and economic liberty. We do this because we think it is godly to do so, and we advocate an understanding of liberty that (I believe in good conscience) is faithful to the Scriptures.

I must hasten first to say that I don't agree with everything Harold has written in his rejoinder below. Part of it seems to dismiss Paul's (and thus God's) command to submit to unjust governing authorities as culturally relative, limited in its binding authority to the unhappy and unenlightened times in which it was written. (Forgive me and please correct me if I have misunderstood you.) But I don't think we have to wait until the Enlightenment to find the value of personal liberty expressed in Christian teaching.

In I Timothy 2, Paul urges prayer "for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way." That is, we are to pray that government would do that for which God has instituted it, and to do no less and no more. Government is to protect the people from one another and from outside invasion so that they are free to go about their own business, providing for their own needs and those of their neighbors (e.g. one's children and aged parents, the poor in one's midst, etc.). Government is to secure fathers in their liberty to fulfill their calling as fathers, bakers and shoemakers to fulfill their callings as bakers and shoemakers, and the church to fulfill its calling as the church. The government is not to raise children, bake bread, preach the gospel, or feed the hungry. In other words, government provides only what people cannot in principle provide on their own. Everything else is rightly left to the self-government of individual citizens, families, and churches. The life of morally informed self-government is one that both the Apostle Paul and natural reason (c.f. Aristotle, John Locke) recognize as "dignified," i.e., the dignity befitting human beings, creatures made in the image of God who governs all things.

harold adds:
David, you nicely sum up what in Protestant terms is the "sphere of influence" argument, and in Catholic thought what is called the doctrine of "subsidiary institutions", wherein the three main institutions of civil life, government, church, and family, each have their own proper sphere of influence or control. Societal upset of all sorts occurs when any of the three attempt an incursion on the sovereignty of another, or attempt a model of rule adapted from the others. Obviously, the greatest offender is the state forcing its way into matters familial and ecclesial, often under the guise of moral concern for the little ones.

I suspect that my predilections afford an earlier and more robust form of resistance to state incursions into areas I consider none of its concern than do your own. On the relativistic thing, I am as wary as anyone of falling into that state of affairs, but perhaps I have in my statement above. I suspect, for example, that the wars spawned by the Reformation were as brutal and wrong-headed as any, yet many men of strong and determined Christian faith were involved, for the principles at stake, and not just for the sake of rebellion or revenge. A special subset of the Reformation wars were the English revolutions, which ended not only Catholic but Divine Right monarchical pretensions, things we consider part of the blessings of the liberty bequethed to us by our own revolution--which strictly speaking, is difficult at best to justify out of anything Jesus or Paul taught regarding civil authorities. Was our own revolution out of line with a nation considering itself (at least for the first 150 years) a Christian nation? Would you have joined the thoughtful Tories, whose consciences and family lineages led them to side with the God-given order of King and Parliament? The colonial pulpits were filled with fiery injunctions to throw off the tyranny of King George, many pastors finding a happy coincidence of Locke and Paul in their reading of the New Testament as it applied to their new city on a hill. I don't consider any of this dispositive for my position, but bring it briefly forward in order to show the ambiguity involved in this vexed question of what the duties and rights of persons as free citizens of a constitutional state are in relation to their duties and rights as Christians, questions which were simply not germane to those under ancient despotisms, who can hardly be considered citizens with any political rights (the vanishing shadow of which allowed Paul as a Roman citizen to appeal the decision of Festus, who would have slapped his wrist and let it go had he not insisted on his rights as a Roman). There is irony for you.


What vexes Harold's righteous soul and mine, and should vex yours, brother Tim, is the leftist desire not to keep people safe in their liberty, but simply to keep them. Not only as political theorists, but also as Christians, we see the statist agenda of political liberals in general, and of the Obama administration in particular, as despotic and dehumanizing, howsoever they dress it up in the language of love and compassion. Some liberals and perhaps most, including you no doubt, are genuinely concerned about human well-being, but we argue that you are tragically mistaken. We will continue to argue, and do so in the fear of God and for the glory of Christ.

Our Liberal Overlords

Every so often, someone offers a flash of brilliance that illuminates the puzzling contours of the world. John Steele Gordon sheds helpful light of that sort on the way political liberals see the world. He calls that view "the liberal paradigm" ("Obama and the Liberal Paradigm," Wall Street Journal, Nov. 4, 2009), and it explains in large measure their passionate support for big government solutions to every human problem, and their hateful disdain for everyone who opposes their efforts.

The basic premise is that the population is divided into three groups. By far the largest group consists of ordinary people. They are good, God fearing and hard working. But they are also often ignorant of their true self-interest ("What's the matter with Kansas?") and thus easily misled. They are also politically weak and thus need to be protected from the second group, which is politically strong.

The second group, far smaller, are the affluent, successful businessmen, corporate executives and financiers. Capitalists in other words. They are the establishment and it is the establishment that, by definition, runs the country. They are, in the liberal paradigm, smart, ruthless and totally self-interested. They care only about personal gain.

And then there is the third group, those few, those happy few, that band of brothers, the educated and enlightened liberals, who understand what is really going on and want to help the members of the first group to live a better and more satisfying life. Unlike the establishment, which supposedly cares only for itself, liberals supposedly care for society as a whole and have no personal self-interest.

Thus the liberal paradigm divides the American body politic into sheep, wolves, and would-be shepherds. The shepherds must defeat the efforts of the wolves.

Gordon focuses on the liberal view of people as helplessly vulnerable to the wolf class. He says that through education and economic success, most people have entered the wolf class themselves, and so the majority no longer has need of progressive liberal protection. But I would like to draw attention to the way liberals understand themselves not as protectors, but as enlightened, and thus with a natural right to rule.

Liberals see themselves in the role of Plato's philosopher kings (The Republic, Book V, 473d-e; Book VII, 514a-521b). These are people who, on account of their love for the truth and their philosophic education understand justice and the nature of things in general, and so are uniquely positioned to govern public affairs. But problem is that liberals, who see themselves as the natural governing class in this way, are not philosophers. They flatter themselves. They are a mix of ideologues, technocrats, and utopians. Plato's philosopher king was none of these things.

In addition, because the philosopher king is a philosophic lover of wisdom, he is not interested in rule. The responsibilities of government are a distraction from his true love: further investigation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. His rule assumes also a public that is incapable of sober, intelligent reflection on public affairs with a view to the truth, i.e., self-government. While many populations are that way, ours is not. Aristotle said that for a people who are "similar in stock [to the rulers] and free," government that is most appropriate is "political rule" in which citizens rule and are ruled in turn (The Politics, 1277b7-16). He was describing what Lincoln called "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," where the people are free, not only by law, but also in character. The liberal preference for big government, however, is based on the view that, like the people chained to the wall in Plato's cave, people are in general incapable of taking care of themselves.

People who are incapable of self-government, people who need caretakers and overlords, who require nannys and stewards, he likens to natural slaves, people who are in themselves cannot direct their affairs for their own good. This appears to be how liberals see the American public. Hence their preference for constituitional change by Supreme Court re-interpretation instead of by popular amendment; hence, their preference for federal government power over government that is close to the people and responsive to them; hence, their resistance to the privatization of social security; hence, their preference for government controlled health insurance as opposed to a market based system.


There is still a strong, free spirit in the country. American are still unusually attached to the nobility of self-government. We can see this in the public unease over recent unprecedented levels of government spending, and in the collapsing public approval for a government run health care system. The upcoming vote on plans for that system will be the Waterloo of American liberty. Either we will keep a government for the protection of our liberties, or we will be kept by an overlord for our protection from all the dangers and pitfalls of life. But that overlord is a looming danger that overshadows all other dangers.

Love a Liberal. Donate to the National Debt.

 

This Christmas, what do you get the person who has everything, for example, your politically liberal friends who own both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue?

Well, consider that liberals are happiest when they are forcing you to put your money where their mouths are, so to speak. The best gift for those friends and family members, therefore, would be donating money to an approved left-wing cause. As they seem to believe that private initiative cannot be trusted to address human needs, it would be most thoughtful to donate to a government program. But which one do you choose? There are so many.

Thankfully, the Department of the Treasury has solved your problem. You can cover all government programs by donating money to help pay off the national debt. Last year, for love of country, people gave $3 million, the highest giving since 1996.

This is what you find on the Treasury website:

How do you make a contribution to reduce the debt?

Make your check payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt, and in the memo section, notate that it is a Gift to reduce the Debt Held by the Public. Mail your check to:

Attn Dept G
Bureau of the Public Debt
P. O. Box 2188
Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188

Conservatives might consider giving to help pay down this publicly burdensome debt if there were evidence of repentance among our national leaders--any sign of repentance among the Democrats, and signs of genuine repentance among the Republicans. Otherwise, it would be like working extra hours to help finance your husband's crack habit.

But liberals object to the very notion of a public, or even broadly cultural, celebration of "Christmas." They celebrate things like "Sparkle Season." Since such concepts, however, have no connection to the the notion of gift-giving (unlike Christmas which celebrates God's gift of his Son for the redemption of sinners), you're off the hook.

You can read the Reuters story here.

You can see the national debt clock here, along with related information and articles. There are so many numbers to the left of the decimal point that it may take you a while to figure out what the number is. I had to work at it. It's about $12 trillion. And that's before we spend trillions more slowly nationalizing health care services.

Here is another clock with live updates and many other helpful figures (GDP, government spending, average household debt, etc.).

The picture at the top of this post was taken a year ago when the sign ran out of digits to accommodate the $10 trillion figure. AP reported: "The clock was put up by the late real estate mogul Seymour Durst in 1989 when the U.S. government's debt was a mere $2.7 trillion, and was even turned off during the 1990s when the debt decreased."

Civilizational Suicide Part I

This is an interesting and encouraging development. Explorers is a branch of the Boy Scouts that trains young people in the techniques and discipline of law enforcement, including counter-terrorism and border patrol. ("Scouts Train to Fight Terrorists, and More," New York Times, May 13, 2009.) No doubt the left, upon reading this, will raise the roof, even though law enforcement is not only a necessary function, but also a noble ambition.

In 2005, Anthony Esolen published a marvelous article on the effect of the sexual revolution and its inevitable consequence, homosexual liberation, on friendship between men, and the devastating consequences of that for the sustainability of our civilization. Yes, it's that serious. ("A Requiem For Friendship: Why Boys Will Not Be Boys and Other Consequences of the Sexual Revolution," Touchstone, Sept. 2005.)

The prominence of male homosexuality changes the language for teenage boys. It is absurd and cruel to say that the boy can ignore it. Even if he would, his classmates will not let him....

For good reason boys used to build tree houses and hang signs barring girls. They know, if only instinctively, that the fire of the friendship cannot subsist otherwise. If the company of girls is made possible, then the company of girls becomes a necessity, if only to avoid having to explain to others and to oneself why one would ever prefer the company of one’s own sex. Thus what is perfectly natural and healthy, indeed very much needed, is cast as irrational and bigoted, or dubious and weak; and thus some boys will cobble together their own brotherhoods that eschew tenderness altogether—criminal brotherhoods that land them in prison. This is all right by us, it seems....

In the name of protecting homosexuals, we ignore the feelings of boys and snatch from them their dwindling opportunities to forge just such friendships whereof homosexual relations are a delusive mimicry....

Reader, the next time you feel moved to pity the delicate man in the workstation near you, give a thought also to an adolescent somewhere, one among uncounted millions, a kid with acne maybe, a kid with an idea or a love, who needs a friend. Know then that your tolerance for the flambeau, which is little more than a self-congratulating cowardice, or your easy and poorly considered approval of the shy workmate’s request that he be allowed to “marry” his partner, means that the unseen boy will not find that friend, and that the idea and the love will die....

No civilization has been built without that foundation of male camaraderie directed toward civic ends: not Athens, not Rome, not Japan, not India. It remains to be seen whether any civilization can long endure without it. Looking at what used to be our cities, I’d say not.

Of course, these are just samples of the deep wells of insight that Esolen offers on this matter in the article. You must read the whole thing if you read anything.

Some of this insight can be found in popular culture, but only traces of it. Here is "Guy Love" from Scubs.




Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

Monsters Among Us

Last Friday, an 11-year-old boy in western Pennsylvania shot his father's fiancee in the head with a youth model 20-gauge shotgun while she was sleeping, killing her, and leaving her two daughters, ages 7 and 11, motherless. The victim, 26-year-old Kenzie Marie Houk, was eight months pregnant. As monstrous as it is for a boy of that age to kill someone so close in relationship to him, and at point blank range, having no concern even for her baby, and with no doubt bloody and horrible results, what is even even more monstrous is that he was able then to put away his gun, get on the school bus, and head off to school as though nothing unusual had happened.

Though most people have heard this story, I find it remarkable that two stories I have read report this monstrous act while revealing the monstrosity of their own moral attitudes.

The original AP story I read added this comment concerning the baby: "Houk's fetus died within minutes due to a lack of oxygen, Lawrence County Coroner Russell Noga said." It is at least ironic that while reporting on what is clearly a monstrous act by a child, the reporter uses language which is intended to preserve our emotional comfort with acting monstrously toward our unborn children. No unindoctrinated woman suffering this kind of loss would say that she lost her "fetus" eight months into her pregnancy. Unless you want to kill it, convince someone else to kill it, or speak of it with cold, scientific abstraction for some other reason, it's a baby.

Then the psychologist adds an opinion, and the moral understanding takes a nosedive from its already lamentable depths.

The Washington Post quotes psychologist Patricia Papernow, an expert on blended families, saying, "It looks awful from the outside and sort of unspeakable, but these are the kinds of feelings that are pretty normal in a new stepfamily. You just hope there's not a loaded gun around."

You see, from the point of view of the most advanced thinking in social science, there's nothing wrong with the boy. He's perfectly normal. The problem is the prevalence of guns in that part of the country.

Notice that from her enlightened vantage point, this particular slaying is only "sort of" unspeakable.

It seems that when one monster emerges from the woods, he draws out a few more. When that happens, it's wise to make a note of where they're coming from.

Congressional Motors

From the WSJ this morning, under the headline "US Could Take Stakes in Big Three":

WASHINGTON -- Congress and the White House inched toward a financial rescue of the Big Three auto makers, negotiating legislation that would give the U.S. government a substantial ownership stake in the industry and a central role in its restructuring.

But Iowahawk was all over this story way back on November 24th, when he leaked the advertising campaign being considered for the new era of nationalization being planned by the Pelosi Democats.

It's got a "return to the golden 70's" kind of feel to it. What do you think?

************

Innes adds:

Ask any American this question. Would the company that employs you be a better company, make a better product, be more innovative, if it were run by the government? (FYI: Rasmussen finds that "Just 14% Say Government Will Run Big Three Better.")

My closest personal experience with a government run company is the Long Island Rail Road. I like them. The conductors are friendly and the trains run more or less on time. They are yet another reason that I am glad I don't live in New Jersey. But the LIRR runs at a huge loss and the trains travel at half the speed they did forty years ago. That is not what made America great.

How is it that these three companies are faring so poorly in the auto market, whereas Toyota, Honda, Hyundai etc. are all turning profits selling American built cars? Does Congress have any clue? If they did understand, would they have the political will to do what is necessary to free these companies to make a profit? Given their illicit relationship with the unions (it is illicit for Congress, a publicly interested body, to be controlled by unions which are organized to promote narrowly private interests) and their fixation with regulation, especially environmental regulation, it seems highly unlikely.

If the federal government takes control of the banks, the auto industry and the health care system, why should it not also proceed to all the "commanding heights" of the economy? Why should these huge economic entities that control the lives of so many ordinary Americans not come under social control for the benefit of the people instead of the few? As the first post-war British prime minister put it, this would be "the embodiment of our socialist principle of placing the welfare of the nation before any section" or narrow interest. He advocated "a mixed economy developing toward socialism.... The doctrines of abundance, of full employment, and of social security require the transfer to public ownership of certain major economic forces and the planned control in the public interest of many other economic activities."

Perhaps Barack Obama will be remembered as the American Clement Atlee.

If so, we will have to suffer through decades of economic stagnation and self-inflicted misery until we learn our lesson and, in response to our tearful prayers, the Lord mercifully raises up an American Margaret Thatcher to remedy the whole mess.

Got Ten Minutes?

This is the most entertaining political piece you're going to come across this year...make yourself feel better.




I especially enjoy the description of the democrat herd as "ballot cattle".

**************
D.C. Innes adds:

This fellow appears to be someone named Alfonzo, or "Zo." He describes himself as Christian, conservative Republican, and no one is pulling the wool over his eyes.

You can see his other videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/machosauceproduction.

The Mask Is Slipping

Obama's much-heralded speech last night, seen by most in attendance on the jumbo-tron from between the classical columns--eerily like scenes from the movie Metropolis--did not outshine either of the Clinton speeches, the benchmark I rather brilliantly established in my last post, Stand and Deliver. But all seriousness aside, Obama looked and sounded to me quite small, despite the Hollywood staging and production. Vaguely fascistic (see Metropolis link above) in scale and tone, tending toward his real nature as mean and vindictive, Obama let slip the new politics, above it all neo-savour mask and got back to his bare-knuckle Chicago instincts. This I believe is the real Obama, as the actual history of his shoving aside five rivals for the Illinois State Senate, including one party stalwart much more deserving of the slot shows; nor is that instance just ancient history, as his campaign's recent attempts to intimidate all who would point to the true depth of the association with William Ayers, America's Homegrown Terrorist, shows. (By the way, remember the total freakout by the media over "homegrown terrorists" after the Oklahoma City bombing happened? Oh, that's right...they thought it was right wing terrorism. Violence from the left is always excusable because the intention is always valid. And did you see the Chicago cops roughing up and then arresting--for what? the ABC News producer outside the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver? Hitler's Brown Shirts are looking on with approval: intimidation is the collective tool for the individually weak).

Back to the speech: Jennifer Rubin has a nice compendium of analysis of it here, but none of which makes the following point. Which is why I am going to make it now.

Despite the standard campaign stories of American families toughing out hard times with staunch American values and durable American strength, of hardy parents and grandparents imparting hard-won wisdom to the nascent candidate in the making, despite the cloaking of themselves with the virtues of hard work, tenacity, and traditional American spirit, both Obama and Biden then immediately proceeded to decry the present conditions--greatly exaggerated of course-that might call these virtues up in the people they claim to stand for. Obama explicitly characterized the Republican stance as leaving people to go it alone, to pull themselves up by the bootstraps--as if this is unparalleled cruelty. Why is it inspiring and virtuous in their forebears but not suitable to today's audience? Is it because the Democratic party is a party of whiners? The party of Euro-socialist envy? For every problem, discomfort, phobia, dislike, and jealousy, the Democrats have a government department to create, a lawsuit to bring, and a government spending program to bring to bear. The socialist strains in all this lay right on the surface; the go-it-alone culture of the Republicans is mean, selfish, and all about the rich getting richer on the backs of the poor. Democrats want to do for the working class masses what they have done for the inner city family--push government programs in and push individual virtues and cultural institutions out. As government programs, entitlements, and invention of rights proliferate, personal responsibility and even opportunity are smothered. The clear import is that the collective is prior to and more important than the individuals of which it is composed.

And that is what I saw last night at the Forum. The truthful motto of this campaign and party is "Seeking Power. Denying Liberty." The mindless applause of socialist and fascist ideas that would efface the individuality of every person there makes another discomfiting allusion to mass rallies as a political tactic.

The mask of the post-partisan Messiah, of the One soaring above the quotidian political fray, has slipped, unveiling a street tough schooled in the use of the Saul Alinski-formulated tactics of lying, bullying, name calling, dishonest infiltration and institutional subversion. The hard left must be pleased as their god-like candidate descends from the blessed heights of Mt Olympus to the rhetorical means streets of political radicalism.